ESSAYS
I. Enlightenment
Published on Gadling, May 3, 2011 as "Love in Venice: how a grumpy
gondolier helped show me the heart of his city"
II. Seasons
Published in Reed Magazine: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Vol. 59, 2006
Published in the Almaden Times, August 2003
III. Remains
Published in Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics, Vol. 3.1, Summer 2012
IV. Desolation
Published in The Journey magazine, March-April 2011, p. 14 - print and online
Published on Gadling, May 3, 2011 as "Love in Venice: how a grumpy
gondolier helped show me the heart of his city"
II. Seasons
Published in Reed Magazine: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Vol. 59, 2006
Published in the Almaden Times, August 2003
III. Remains
Published in Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics, Vol. 3.1, Summer 2012
IV. Desolation
Published in The Journey magazine, March-April 2011, p. 14 - print and online
Enlightenment (excerpt)
by Jenny Walicek (2011)
Ah, the gondolier.
We've been admiring these flocks of muscular, zebra-shirted young men at every stazi, but we've avoided their incessant invitations to board. We tell each other it's a kitschy thing to do, not in keeping with our quest for authenticity, but the truth is that, at 80 euro, we'd rather appreciate them from afar. Then, late one languid afternoon near the end of our trip, we wander through a tiny campo off the beaten path and spy, leaning against the balustrade of the bridge in a despondent pose, a solitary gondolier.
For the rest of this essay, go to Gadling.com, where it's been published as "Love in Venice: how a grumpy gondolier helped show me the heart of his city."
We've been admiring these flocks of muscular, zebra-shirted young men at every stazi, but we've avoided their incessant invitations to board. We tell each other it's a kitschy thing to do, not in keeping with our quest for authenticity, but the truth is that, at 80 euro, we'd rather appreciate them from afar. Then, late one languid afternoon near the end of our trip, we wander through a tiny campo off the beaten path and spy, leaning against the balustrade of the bridge in a despondent pose, a solitary gondolier.
For the rest of this essay, go to Gadling.com, where it's been published as "Love in Venice: how a grumpy gondolier helped show me the heart of his city."
Seasons
by Jenny Walicek (2006)
Here in the south San Jose foothills, the sharpest turn of the year is that between spring and summer. There is an indefinite intermingling of the other seasons, a gradual adjustment in the quantities of color and water and growth, until we belatedly realize the nakedness of the buckeye or the buds bursting out on the oak. But summer sneaks up on spring and pounces. One morning there is a pale frothy head on the long green grasses, and the next their soft waves have become a brittle, stabbing mélange of thistles and foxtails.
With equal abruptness my beloved father has been stricken with a ravaging cancer that has rendered him a frail, parched shell of his indefatigable self. From my home along the edge of Quicksilver County Park, just a few ridges and seventy years from the hills he roamed in the 1930s, it is easy to mark a parallel between his ruin and that which has been wrought upon the landscape. Even as I write, the golden glow of evening burns on the tips of the yellow grasses, flickering, swaying in the breeze like a candlelight vigil in a vast memento mori. The timeless dance of death has trampled across both my meadow and my heart, and I ache with the melancholy of universal demise.
It is through the beauty and spirituality of nature that I have always connected with my father, who made sure his six children grew up in its context. He remembered fondly his boyhood exploring in the Los Gatos foothills, and described his adventures to us so vividly at the dinner table or on family hikes or as he tucked us into bed that I still cannot pass Lexington Lake without envisioning four dusty, terrified boys dangling from the now extinct flume, still cannot see the town creek without hearing his whoop of joy at a just-plucked trout or a bare-skinned plunge, still cannot see the scattered light under a sycamore without feeling the sting of his tree-fort splinters. His was a childhood of the outdoors, and he recreated it for us in well-told tales, mountain vacations, and the natural settings he chose for our homes.
He built our first house himself, a simple structure nestled on a shaded slope among madrone and tan oak and bay laurel in the Saratoga hills, near Los Gatos. The air was so clear the night Neil Armstrong strode across the Sea of Tranquility that I insisted I could see him with the naked eye. By day we dug tunnels toward China and threw rocks down into the sprawling valley, where the rising smoke of orchard pyres signaled the sacrifice of apricots for silicon. As the world below us became paved for progress and the proximity of our hillside home lured weekly visits from ardent realtors, my father moved us to an old apple farm on the far side of the mountains. There, sans television, we were blissfully happy riding horses and building forts and climbing trees. The beach was a mile away, its sand unthreatened by the crucibles of what would soon be called Silicon Valley. The encroachment of urbanity upon our childhoods had been deferred.
My father always took us real camping and fishing, tended a thriving vegetable garden, taught us about nature, and encouraged us to be resourceful and responsible. He and my mother, another former teacher, believed children needed fresh air, whole food, good books and inspiring music – a formula I find myself struggling to follow in a society pervaded by Halo, Quarter Pounders, and Eminem. My own childhood was suffused with Wordsworth’s “celestial light,” and I will be forever grateful to my parents for that.
But death cannot retract that gift; in fact, it enhances it. Even in the decay of the bleached meadow I am discovering that there are gifts that cannot be opened or appreciated until the life has left them. The pungent fragrance of the fallen oak leaves and sunburnt weeds crackling under my feet helps me understand that there is a different quality of being in the fallen leaf, the severed stem – a new beauty in the brokenness, a new force released by the rupture. There is an elevation that follows the segregation of life and death, just as the setting sun clears the way for the grandeur of a star-spangled sky. Within me, too, this experience has carved a hollow from which emerges the means to replenish my soul. Out of the numb nothingness, as with all origins, a creative spark is generated. There is a song that requires death that it might be sung.
Twilight tints the mountains lavender. I stand just outside the split-rail fence that divides my suburban home from the untamed wilderness, the artificial from the natural, the fleeting from the eternal, the present from the past. Before me sprawl the wooded foothills, undulating with oaks and buckeyes, where my children play. Beyond, in purple layers spiked with redwoods, rise the forested hills where their grandfather once played. Down their far side, in the invisible distance, roll the orchard hills where I played as a child, and where my father now lies fading in the old white farmhouse. The hills are forever; childhood, alas, but a flicker.
Yet even as nature robs me of his existence, I know that it is through nature that I will forever detect my father’s presence. I am sure to find him in sun-spattered, backlit woods, in the rich scent of warm plowed earth, in the brash squawk of the stellar jay, in the mineral taste of a mountain stream. And wherever a trout ripples the dappled water, I will again be a child trudging along beside him, his big warm hand over mine.
Rod Clendenen passed away on June 16, 2003 at his farm in Watsonville, surrounded by his wife and six children.
With equal abruptness my beloved father has been stricken with a ravaging cancer that has rendered him a frail, parched shell of his indefatigable self. From my home along the edge of Quicksilver County Park, just a few ridges and seventy years from the hills he roamed in the 1930s, it is easy to mark a parallel between his ruin and that which has been wrought upon the landscape. Even as I write, the golden glow of evening burns on the tips of the yellow grasses, flickering, swaying in the breeze like a candlelight vigil in a vast memento mori. The timeless dance of death has trampled across both my meadow and my heart, and I ache with the melancholy of universal demise.
It is through the beauty and spirituality of nature that I have always connected with my father, who made sure his six children grew up in its context. He remembered fondly his boyhood exploring in the Los Gatos foothills, and described his adventures to us so vividly at the dinner table or on family hikes or as he tucked us into bed that I still cannot pass Lexington Lake without envisioning four dusty, terrified boys dangling from the now extinct flume, still cannot see the town creek without hearing his whoop of joy at a just-plucked trout or a bare-skinned plunge, still cannot see the scattered light under a sycamore without feeling the sting of his tree-fort splinters. His was a childhood of the outdoors, and he recreated it for us in well-told tales, mountain vacations, and the natural settings he chose for our homes.
He built our first house himself, a simple structure nestled on a shaded slope among madrone and tan oak and bay laurel in the Saratoga hills, near Los Gatos. The air was so clear the night Neil Armstrong strode across the Sea of Tranquility that I insisted I could see him with the naked eye. By day we dug tunnels toward China and threw rocks down into the sprawling valley, where the rising smoke of orchard pyres signaled the sacrifice of apricots for silicon. As the world below us became paved for progress and the proximity of our hillside home lured weekly visits from ardent realtors, my father moved us to an old apple farm on the far side of the mountains. There, sans television, we were blissfully happy riding horses and building forts and climbing trees. The beach was a mile away, its sand unthreatened by the crucibles of what would soon be called Silicon Valley. The encroachment of urbanity upon our childhoods had been deferred.
My father always took us real camping and fishing, tended a thriving vegetable garden, taught us about nature, and encouraged us to be resourceful and responsible. He and my mother, another former teacher, believed children needed fresh air, whole food, good books and inspiring music – a formula I find myself struggling to follow in a society pervaded by Halo, Quarter Pounders, and Eminem. My own childhood was suffused with Wordsworth’s “celestial light,” and I will be forever grateful to my parents for that.
But death cannot retract that gift; in fact, it enhances it. Even in the decay of the bleached meadow I am discovering that there are gifts that cannot be opened or appreciated until the life has left them. The pungent fragrance of the fallen oak leaves and sunburnt weeds crackling under my feet helps me understand that there is a different quality of being in the fallen leaf, the severed stem – a new beauty in the brokenness, a new force released by the rupture. There is an elevation that follows the segregation of life and death, just as the setting sun clears the way for the grandeur of a star-spangled sky. Within me, too, this experience has carved a hollow from which emerges the means to replenish my soul. Out of the numb nothingness, as with all origins, a creative spark is generated. There is a song that requires death that it might be sung.
Twilight tints the mountains lavender. I stand just outside the split-rail fence that divides my suburban home from the untamed wilderness, the artificial from the natural, the fleeting from the eternal, the present from the past. Before me sprawl the wooded foothills, undulating with oaks and buckeyes, where my children play. Beyond, in purple layers spiked with redwoods, rise the forested hills where their grandfather once played. Down their far side, in the invisible distance, roll the orchard hills where I played as a child, and where my father now lies fading in the old white farmhouse. The hills are forever; childhood, alas, but a flicker.
Yet even as nature robs me of his existence, I know that it is through nature that I will forever detect my father’s presence. I am sure to find him in sun-spattered, backlit woods, in the rich scent of warm plowed earth, in the brash squawk of the stellar jay, in the mineral taste of a mountain stream. And wherever a trout ripples the dappled water, I will again be a child trudging along beside him, his big warm hand over mine.
Rod Clendenen passed away on June 16, 2003 at his farm in Watsonville, surrounded by his wife and six children.
